The Jury Has Returned

     One jury, two cases:

     In Denmark, lawmakers are pushing to have such sex education included in mandatory language classes for refugees. The German region of Bavaria, the main entry point to Germany for asylum seekers, is already experimenting with such classes at a shelter for teenage migrants in the town of Passau.

     By “sex education,” the Times is referring to classes that seek to teach Muslim immigrants that rape is wrong. But read on.

     Norway, however, has been leading the way. Its immigration department mandated that such programs be offered nationwide in 2013, and hired a nonprofit foundation, Alternative to Violence, to train refugee center workers in how to organize and conduct classes on sexual and other forms of violence. The government provided funding for two years to pay for interpreters for the classes and is now reviewing the results and whether to extend its support....

     Many refugees “come from cultures that are not gender equal and where women are the property of men,” Mr. Isdal said. “We have to help them adapt to their new culture.”

     Note that critical phrase: “cultures that are not gender equal,” etc. We’ve been told this “culture” lie over an over again. But do please read on.

     The first such program to teach immigrants about local norms and how to avoid misreading social signals was initiated in Stavanger, the center of Norway’s oil industry and a magnet for migrants, after a series of rapes from 2009 to 2011.

     Henry Ove Berg, who was Stavanger’s police chief during the spike in rape cases, said he supported providing migrants sex education because “people from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a miniskirt, only in a burqa.” When they get to Norway, he added, “something happens in their heads.”

     “Something happens in their heads” -- ? Excuse me? The “something” that “happened in their heads” happened when they were children. It’s called Islam, and it is most emphatically not a “culture.”

     That’s the first case.

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     Religious dictates, once accepted, can only be rejected along with the religion that dictated them. Moreover, as most religions claim that one’s fortunes in the afterlife depend upon one’s conduct in this world, there’s no way for any law or other temporal inducement to compete with them.

     Islamic doctrine essentially dehumanizes women. According to Islamic teaching, women are untrustworthy, controlled by their lusts, must always be under the hand of a man, have no rights, and when unclothed constitute a justification for rape. Remember this incident from a few years back?

     In a Ramadan sermon that has outraged Muslim women leaders, Sydney-based Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali also alluded to the infamous Sydney gang rapes, suggesting the attackers were not entirely to blame.

     While not specifically referring to the rapes, brutal attacks on four women for which a group of young Lebanese men received long jail sentences, Sheik Hilali said there were women who "sway suggestively" and wore make-up and immodest dress ... "and then you get a judge without mercy (rahma) and gives you 65 years".

     "But the problem, but the problem all began with who?" he asked.

     The leader of the 2000 rapes in Sydney's southwest, Bilal Skaf, a Muslim, was initially sentenced to 55 years' jail, but later had the sentence reduced on appeal.

     In the religious address on adultery to about 500 worshippers in Sydney last month, Sheik Hilali said: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?

     "The uncovered meat is the problem."

     The sheik then said: "If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred."

     He said women were "weapons" used by "Satan" to control men.

     What the sheik said above is Islamic doctrine. It’s the will of God that women who dare to go about “uncovered,” or without the protection of a male relative, should be abused. A Muslim believes himself to be doing God’s will when he rapes such a woman – and note that in Islam-dominated countries, the victim cannot even complain to the law about having been raped for fear that she’ll be stoned to death for “adultery.”

     Yet Norway, Denmark, and no doubt other Scandinavian countries hope to “teach” Muslim immigrants, wholly dedicated to the teachings of Islam, that rape is wrong. We shall see.

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     But I did say “one jury, two cases,” didn’t I? Note that the Times article I cited implicitly endorses the Norwegian and Danish efforts. The Times has never been terribly friendly toward traditional moral teachings. It causes me to wonder whether there’s anyone on its editorial staff who could frame a coherent argument why murder, for instance, is wrong.

     I was told some time ago of a philosophy class whose professor challenged his students to construct such an argument: “Why was it wrong for Cain to murder Abel?” The students floundered, one after another, until the professor called a halt to the exercise, and provided the answer:

     “Why was it wrong for Cain to murder Abel? Because it was.”

     Alternately, we have Herbert Spencer:

     I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal. [From his series of essays on “The Proper Sphere of Government”]

     Or if you prefer, there’s C. S. Lewis:

     This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. [From The Abolition Of Man]

     The project of the modern anti-moralist, regardless of whether he calls himself a “liberal,” a “progressive,” a “socialist,” or anything else, is wholly founded on the rejection of the Moral Law as it’s written into the nature of Man. The Times is owned and operated by such persons, and the peoples of Scandinavia accepted their school of thought long ago. And today they grapple with this incomprehensibly difficult proposition – teaching Muslims, who believe that to rape the “uncovered” woman is licit in the eyes of Allah and might well even merit praise, why rape is wrong – and find themselves unable to get a purchase on it.

     The “refugees” probably laugh at them when class is over. But God, the Author of the Moral Law, will have the last laugh. Ironically, the most pungent expression of that principle comes from an atheist who denounced religion itself:

     “Senor D’Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?”
     “Just exactly what it deserves.”
     “Oh, how cruel!”
     “Don’t you believe in the operation of the moral law, Madame?” Francisco asked gravely. “I do.”

     [From Atlas Shrugged.]

     It’s happening to Scandinavia today...and perhaps all too soon it will happen here in America.